A data center is a platform on which centralized management and sharing of information within an enterprise or an organization and between enterprises or organizations are implemented, and information services and decision support are provided. The data center implements centralized processing, storage, transmission, switching, and management of information in physical space, for example, a building. A computer device, a server device, a network device, and a storage device are key devices in a data center equipment room. With the development of video streams, social services, and cloud computing, requirements on interaction of massive data between data center servers are increasing, which requires a high-efficiency interconnection solution to be designed in a data center network, so as to provide higher bandwidth with lower delay. However, due to limitations of technologies of a backplane, energy consumption, and the like, an electrical switching technology cannot meet requirements on bandwidth and delay in a data center.
In a C-through architecture proposed by the Rice University, Carnegie University, and Intel Labs, a configurable optical switching device is added to an existing data center. When a long data flow, for example, whose length reaches 1s, needs to be transmitted over a communications connection between two TOR (top of rack) switches, a central controller configures an optical connection with high-speed broadband for this pair of TOR switches, and the two TOR switches communicate with each other by using an optical network provided by the optical switching device. However, some other TOR switches use an electrical network to exchange data if only a small amount of data is transmitted. In this way, the optical network undertakes switching of a long data flow, and the electrical network undertakes switching of small-sized traffic.
However, the configurable optical switching device is mainly responsible for data switching in a long data flow (for example, data backup), and when a network mainly serves a short data flow that is similar to a social service, optical switching plays a minor role, and therefore, a capacity of a switching network cannot be effectively improved, and energy consumption cannot be greatly reduced.